Here are two very different routes to the same very distant destination. We are big fans of Jodie Foster, as any right thinking person would be, and I thoroughly enjoyed Neil Blomkamp's "District 9" (on a very long flight 3 years ago, in just the state of disorientation and displacement that facilitates great cinematic engagement). However, Elysium, the film, suggests that to get to Elysium, the lost paradise, the essential qualities for the traveller are firstly, a mystic prediction delivered by a wise old Nun during one's childhood, and secondly, the ability to run, shout, punch and shoot for 120 minutes The film looks brilliant; the Californian cityscapes are claustrophobic and very believably decayed , but these are punctuated by far too many master-criminal-in-his-lair-surrounded-by-screens-and-lackeys scenes to conjure a consistent sense of space.
Ellen Gallagher generates a near-effortless Paradisian dimension by creating the creatures who might populate it in a ghostly, whited-out form (her
Watery Ecstatic fish and deep sea creatures emerge only barely from the paper), and by hinting at it through goggle-eyed start-charts and forbiddingly seamless black rubber canvases. The
Kabuki videos, which use a rhythmically unfolding
Chinoiserie of aquatic characters across a cartoon seabed, manage with a loop of half-remembered gamelan music what legions of post-production digital artists failed in
Elysium: to elicit the
other-worldly, the clouded paradise.
